


oh baby

by neville



Series: thorbruce shorts [17]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bruce Banner-centric, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Endgame (Movie), First Kiss, M/M, bruce deserves a happy life, idk this is just me rambling tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 17:28:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26551384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neville/pseuds/neville
Summary: Bruce is tired of holding his feelings at an arm's length.
Relationships: Bruce Banner/Thor
Series: thorbruce shorts [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1419172
Comments: 3
Kudos: 65





	oh baby

**Author's Note:**

> this is less of a fic and more of a ramble but i really enjoyed writing it so i decided to upload it anyway! hope u enjoy. thorbruce live in my mind rent free

He’s big, and green, and big, and green, and Bruce stops feeling deserving of that and wakes up one morning in a body that feels comically small even though he’s now his normal size. He feels electrical impulses of pain in his blackened arm as he makes himself a cup of coffee. He suddenly feels very tired, and old, and like he has a lot of things to say that he’s been putting off for years but  _ should _ because the only thing stopping him is his own avoidance. He sidesteps the issues, puts them at an arm’s length. 

And frankly, he’s been doing it for too fucking long. He feels old in the aches of his joints, even if he doesn’t actually know how long he’ll live. He’s wasting time that’s better spent. 

This is how he finds himself chartering a flight using Avengers money to New Asgard; it’s not easy to reach otherwise. Tony would approve, he thinks as he leans back against the soft leather of the kind of chair you only get to sit in when you’ve got money. Bruce has about two cents to rub together most of the time, but Tony never let him run dry after they met, a small favour for the massive indignity of his being the kind of rich that Bruce finds disgusting on principle. There had been lots of small favours, by the end; there’s even a couple of grants in Bruce’s name. He drank a lot of takeaway coffee and jittered away in his apartment and in lecture theatres across the state. 

He tilts his head back and hears Tony’s voice reverberating in his mind. 

_ Is this a bad idea? _ he asks the abstract form of Tony that lives in his mind, the version that’ll never die. Bruce doesn’t believe in the afterlife so much as he believes in this: conjuring people inside his mind to have them say what he needs to hear. He’ll listen when the voice isn’t his own. 

_ Brucie, trust me when I say this is the best idea you’ve ever had.  _

Korg tells him that Thor is going away for a while, and Bruce knows what that means, and  _ God  _ his short legs don’t carry him up the crag as fast as he wants them to, and this flawed body of his has to stop to gasp in rattling breaths. He grasps for the Hulk in the back of his mind, says “come on, come on”, and runs until he can’t feel his legs anymore. New Asgard is steep. He worries that he’s going to see Thor and throw up, because that’s just the sort of thing that he would do. The only blessing is the breeze in the air, a relief on his skin, a reminder to keep going. He can feel hope on the winds. 

Words fail him. Words have always failed him. Bruce is an absolute torrent of inconsistent emotions all vying for a turn in the spotlight and none of them are possible to describe in words and so instead he describes them in failures, but this will not be another one. Bruce is tired of that. Bruce is tired of pushing himself away. He feels and he will feel and he will feel in public and let it be known. 

He doesn’t even notice Valkyrie when he pushes past her; he stares at Thor, the only object of his single-minded vision, of his best-laid plans to a better life (even if it takes a while), and kisses him. It’s not so easy when Thor is so tall, but for a moment he bends down to accommodate and then a beat later he simply swipes Bruce from the ground so that they can be level. 

Thor is the feeling that’s the hardest to find words for. Love has always been ineffable to Bruce; how is he supposed to describe the way that he feels a  _ rush _ inside of him when Thor touches him, or the strange feeling of yearning in his chest when he thinks about Thor late at night?

People find him hard. Bruce relates. 

“Don’t go,” he says. “If you want to take a break from Asgard, there’s – there’s a whole world out there.” He buries his head in Thor’s shoulder. “It’s got double the birdsong.” 

That isn’t mathematically accurate. But he hears it outside of his bedroom window, and it feels that way.  The quiet of the past five torturous years is over. The pain, acute and sharp as a knife, is gone (even if it’s been replaced by new forms, none of these hurt as hard as half of the world). 

“You don’t have anything to prove to that guy,” Bruce says, realising only as he says it that he doesn’t know the name of that stupid fucking guy from this ship who grates on his nerves. “You don’t have anything to prove to anyone.” 

For the first time in what might be his entire life, he realises he’s not afraid of anything that Thor might say; and because they’re coming in thick and fast, a sharp shock of epiphanies, he also realises that this is because he has an unshakeable trust in Thor. He has complete and utter blind faith in the God of Thunder. 

“I can’t believe I had to watch that,” he hears Valkyrie say dryly. 

Thor does not let go of Bruce when Bruce expects that he will, and instead runs a warm hand through his hair, soft and curly again. “What is it that you called that little fight between Stark and Rogers?” 

It takes Bruce a moment, then it all comes flooding back: coffee somewhere in Australia, whenever it was that Thor had been staying there, the sun beating down on him as he’d stirred in his sugar. He laughs. He missed the sound of that. “A pissing contest,” he says. 

“I think,” he says, “I would prefer to be with you than to be in a pissing contest with Peter Quill. Since that’s an option now.” 

Thor’s hair is still too tangled and matted for Bruce to run his fingers through, and he thinks that they’ll have to sort that out because he  _ wants to _ , but for now he cups Thor’s face, beard scratching his fingers, and grins. “Okay,” he says, breathless. “Okay.” 


End file.
